Upstaged : Maris, Mantle Took the Gloss Off Other Career Years in ’61

Think of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and the year 1961 comes to mind.

Think of Willie Kirkland, Willie Tasby, Ken Hunt and Steve Bilko, and what might come to mind is, “Who?”

Mantle and Maris’ pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record, 60 in a season, overshadowed a host of other exploits in 1961, the first year of baseball’s first expansion.

But although the feats of Kirkland, Tasby, Hunt and Bilko didn’t match the magnitude of Maris’ 61 home runs, they achieved brief, shining moments.

“There were an awful lot of guys who were sitting in triple-A that there were no spots for with the eight-team league,” said Hunt, who hit 25 home runs and drove in 84 runs for the Los Angeles Angels but injured his shoulder in 1962 and was out of baseball by 1965.

“Expansion opened up spots for them. It was my chance. I was 25, 26 years old. I wasn’t going to get another chance.”

Eagerness to seize the moment explains Hunt’s fine season, Tasby’s career highs of 17 home runs and 63 RBIs for the expansion Washington Senators, and Bilko’s 20 homers and 59 RBIs for the Angels.

But that doesn’t explain why those players never again approached those levels. And it doesn’t explain why a number of statistical oddities cropped up in the American League in 1961, when some good hitters experienced moments of greatness and some ordinary players had extraordinary seasons:

--Detroit first baseman Norm Cash hit .361 with 41 home runs and 132 RBIs. He had hit .286 in 1960, his first full season with the Tigers, a solid performance, but gave no hint that he would make a 75-point jump to the highest batting average of the decade. Cash, who hit .243 in 1962, spent 17 seasons in the major leagues and had a .271 career average.

--Johnny Blanchard of the New York Yankees, who shared playing time with Yogi Berra and Elston Howard, hit .305 in 93 games with 21 homers and 54 RBIs, all career bests. He had hit .242 in 1960 and dipped back to .232 in 1962.

--Jimmy Piersall, then with Cleveland, hit .322 in 1961, exceeding his career average by 50 points. He hit .244 in 1962 with Washington.

--Chicago White Sox center fielder Jim Landis, who had hit .253 in 1960, then hit .283 with a career-high 22 home runs and 85 RBIs in 1961. He hit .228 with 15 homers and 61 RBIs in 1962.

--Kirkland, who drove in 65 runs for the San Francisco Giants in 1960, had 95 RBIs in 1961 for the Cleveland Indians. He reverted to 72 RBIs the next season and 47 in 1963.

--Jim Gentile, long stuck behind Gil Hodges in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, hit .302 with 46 homers and 141 RBIs for the 1961 Baltimore Orioles. Five of his homers were grand slams. His RBI total remains the club record. In 1962, he hit .251, with 33 homers and 87 RBIs.

“I was a .260 hitter and I ended a .260 hitter,” said Gentile, now retired and living in Edmond, Okla. “I averaged 20 to 25 homers a year except for that one great year. It was just one of those things where everything seemed to go right for me.”

Led by the Yankees’ 240 home runs, the 10-team American League produced 1,534 in 1961. That is an average of more than 153 a team, a huge increase over the 1960 average of 136. Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, the Angels’ home in their first season, inflated the 1961 totals by 248.

“It disturbed the status quo somewhat,” Seymour Siwoff of the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball’s official statistician, said of the one-time minor league park.

Metropolitan Stadium, where the original Washington Senators moved in 1961 after becoming the Minnesota Twins, was the site of 181 homers. Still, Siwoff and other statisticians believe the home run bounty in 1961 was “no great disparity” for that era.

Said Donald Coffin, chairman of the statistical analysis committee for the Society for American Baseball Research: “Homers were up 10% from 1955 to 1960, with a bulge in 1961. Then you add Wrigley Field, where Steve Bilko, for God’s sake, hit 28.”

Bilko had been a prolific home run hitter in the Pacific Coast League.

“Sometimes things like that go in cycles. Baseball at that time was adding home run hitters, like Harmon Killebrew, Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda. It was a sort of burst, and there’s no rational explanation.”

While home runs surged, the American League batting average went up only one point from 1960 to 1961, from .255 to .256. The National League, which didn’t expand to 10 teams until 1962, had a greater increase in its batting average, from 1960 to ‘61, from .255 to .262.

“When you have expansion, you have both hitters and pitchers added who are worse than the hitters and pitchers in the league,” Coffin said. “It diluted both sides of the equation. But you might expect a greater variation in performance (instead of an overall rise). You might have had more people in ’61 who had career years, but that’s probably more likely than saying the pitching got worse.”

The increase in earned-run average from 3.87 in 1960 to 4.02 in 1961 was “fairly substantial,” according to Lyle Spatz, chairman of SABR’s records committee, but he noted that the National League’s ERA increased by a greater margin from 1960 to ‘61, from 3.76 to 4.03.

“I don’t think it was anything in the water,” Spatz said of the unusual season. “I think you could look at almost any year and look at a player who had a career year and say, ‘Why did he do it this year?’ ”

Maris’ home run record has often been denigrated as the product of a schedule that was longer by eight games than Ruth’s in 1927 and padded by weak expansion pitching.

“I’ve never quite bought that,” Spatz said.

Neither do those who watched Maris closely.

“I don’t know if guys who stated that ever played the game,” said Blanchard, who sells printing products in the Twin Cities area. “They’re mostly frustrated jocks. Ask anybody that played the game. . . . I think we had as good, if not better, pitching then as they do today.”

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Maris in 1961 hit .343 against “experienced” pitchers--those who had started at least 25 games or had 10 saves in 1960--and .241 against less experienced pitchers who presumably got their chance through expansion. He hit 23 homers against the more accomplished group, one in every 7.2 at-bats, but one in every 11.2 at-bats against other pitchers.

“It’s much easier to hit a pitcher that you’ve seen several times,” Blanchard said. “You’ve got a young guy, a rookie pitcher, the first time around the league he might go 8-0. Then (hitters) know his fastball, they know how his breaking ball breaks. He gives you an oh-for-four collar the first time, but the next time you hit him.

“It makes sense that Rog hit the pitchers he knew.”

With Maris and Mantle on record home run paces and drawing so much attention--Mantle hit a career-high 54 homers--Blanchard, Howard and Moose Skowron went virtually unnoticed. Howard hit a career-high .348 in 129 games, and first baseman Skowron hit a personal-best 28 homers.

“During the Mantle and Maris campaign, they took all the pressure off the rest of us,” said Blanchard, one of six Yankees who hit at least 20 homers that season. “They got to 45, 50 and nobody paid us any attention. We all had good years because the pressure was off. It worked for me. I kind of shuffled in the back door.”

Gentile also attributed his success to a strong lineup on a powerful team. The Orioles were 95-67 in 1961 but finished third, behind the Yankees (105-53) and the Tigers (101-61).

“It all depends on who’s hitting in front of you,” Gentile said. “I had (Luis) Aparicio, (Brooks) Robinson, and (Jackie) Brandt, so it was a hellacious year. I was lucky enough, someone once pointed out to me, to drive in 141 runs on 147 hits. . . .

“I feel I have been overlooked. I get a lot of calls from newspaper people saying that if Maris and Mantle didn’t have the years they had, I had an MVP year. . . . Everything just fell into place for me that year.”

The same was true for Cash, his contemporaries say.

“Norm was an excellent pull hitter and in the friendly confines of Detroit, he had that one career year,” Hunt said.

Said Bill Rigney, manager of the Angels from 1961-68 and now an assistant to the president of the Oakland Athletics: “Cash and players like Mantle and Maris were going to have those years, no matter what. They didn’t exploit us. (Cash) was a real solid player. I can look back on the years I had Rod Carew, where he’d hit .330, .340 and all of a sudden (in 1977) he hit .388. That can happen with a quality player, and I’m sure that’s what happened with Norm Cash.”

According to Pete Palmer, an editor of the reference book “Total Baseball,” Cash was the only player “who was off the charts” in 1961.

“The expected difference in the batting average of a regular player from year to year is 30 points, which is 15 hits over the course of a season,” Palmer said. “Five percent of players could change 60 points from one year to the next. If you look at 100 players, five will vary by 60 points from one year to the next with absolutely nothing changed (in conditions).

“A guy who plays 20 years is going to have a year where his average is 60 points higher (than his career average). Three percent of the players on any team you would expect to have a 60-point increase in any particular season. The variation due to chance is more than people expect, but there’s also changes due to changes in the ball and changes in the ballparks. When the NL went to generic ballparks in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in the early ‘70s, those parks were difficult to hit homers in and the number of homers went down.”

If expansion pitching helped anyone greatly, it helped the marginal players. Maris didn’t feast at Wrigley Field, which was 330 feet down the lines, 365 to the power alleys and 410 to center. He hit two homers there in 1961, as did Mantle. Gentile hit more homers there than Maris, eight in nine games. Kirkland and Rocky Colavito each hit four, and Angel catcher Earl Averill hit 16 there, equaling his total in his four previous seasons. Averill hit four homers in 1962, when the Angels played in roomier Dodger Stadium, and was out of baseball after the 1963 season.

“I can remember some of the home runs Gentile hit,” Rigney said. “I can still see some of them. And I can remember a couple Roger hit. But that little ballpark didn’t make the difference for them.

“Looking back, I’m sure expansion had some effect. Any time you thin the product out, the good (hitting) is going to get a little bit better. I think Maris might have hit 61 anyway, he was that good. And Mantle would have had his 54. He’d had seasons like that before. Neither one of them hit a lot of home runs off us, though. We didn’t make the difference between them hitting 50 or 60. . . .

“Bilko had always been a home run hitter, in the NL and in the Pacific Coast League, and Wrigley Field was a park he was familiar with (having played there in the minors). That helped him.

“With Mantle, it didn’t matter that the park wasn’t made for him. He could hit home runs in the Grand Canyon. But for guys like Bilko and Tasby, who had a certain amount of comfort zone, the effect of expansion pitching helped. It wasn’t a big thing, but for them it was. Once the pitching caught up to them, they just couldn’t play good enough and they disappeared.”

Whether Hunt might have repeated his ’61 accomplishments can never be known because of his injury.

“I could have stuck around as a part-time player, but I wasn’t that type,” said Hunt, the sales manager for a rubber company in Gardena. “I was really anxious to make some money and play. . . . I’d always had a good minor league career. I was never a 40-home run hitter, but I had a lot of doubles and I had only one year in the minors that was really bad.”

Bilko, who died in 1978 at 50, “just couldn’t hit major league pitching over the long haul,” Hunt said. “Steve was an excellent hitter in the PCL and he hit a lot of homers at Wrigley Field.”

Will the 1993 expansion, which will add the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins to the National League, spur a repeat of 1961?

Hunt thinks there will be a decline in play because the talent pool, depleted in the expansions of 1969 and ‘77, is more shallow than it was 30 years ago.

“In the ‘50s and ‘60s, you have to remember, there were 30 minor leagues and each team had eight (farm) teams,” Hunt said. “You had so many players waiting for a shot. You don’t have those leagues anymore. And now, you get (players) out of college and they don’t teach them the way the organization plays. Here’s Mark McGwire (of Oakland), who’s content to hit .220 as long as he hits his home runs and drives his Mercedes.”

Gentile, however, expects expansion to trigger a home run boom.

“You see more now, anyway, like that second baseman for Oakland (Mike Gallego) who hit 11 homers in his career and has 11 this season,” he said. “Plus they’ve brought the fences in 10 or 15 feet.”

The statisticians expect the addition of inferior pitching to be balanced by the inferior hitters.

“You’re going to get a greater variability,” Coffin said. “People who expect expansion is going to affect the level of performance are wrong. It’s the variability that’s going to change.”

Nothing, however, will change Blanchard’s memories of 1961.

“It’s a manager’s dream every spring, that is when he finally gets the roster done, that every ballplayer has a good year,” Blanchard said. “He hopes, he prays that in the starting lineup, if he has three guys who have good years, then he’ll be the happiest guy in the world.

“Out of three big heavy hitters, two will have good years, one mediocre. Or the other way around. On that ballclub, we were a manager’s dream. Everybody had a good year, even guys that came off the bench had good years. . . .

“The game has been the same for 100 years. It’s the turkeys that play it who have changed.”

1961 Was Their Year, Too

A look at some of the American League players who had ‘career seasons’ in 1961.

PLAYER TEAM BEST SEASON 961 BEST SE IN 1961 BEFORE 1961 TOTALS AFTER 1 HR RBI BA HR RBI BA HR RBI Earl Averill Angels 10 34 .237 21 59 .266 4 22 Steve Bilko Angels 21 84 .251 20 59 .279 8 38 Johnny Blanchard Yankees 4 14 .242 21 54 .305 16 45 Dick Brown Tigers 7 20 .237 16 45 .266 12 40 Norm Cash Tigers 18 63 .286 41 132 .361 32 93 Gary Geiger Red Sox 11 48 .245 18 64 .232 16 54 Jim Gentile Orioles 21 98 .292 46 141 .302 33 87 Gene Green Senators 13 55 .281 18 62 .280 11 28 Ken Hunt Angels 0 1 .333 25 84 .255 6 20 Willie Kirkland Indians 22 68 .272 27 95 .259 21 72 Jim Landis White Sox 15 64 .277 22 85 .283 15 61 Bubba Phillips Indians 7 42 .270 18 72 .264 10 54 Al Smith White Sox 22 77 .306 28 93 .278 16 82 Willie Tasby Senators 13 48 .250 17 63 .251 4 17

PLAYER ASON 961 BA Earl Averill .219 Steve Bilko .287 Johnny Blanchard .225 Dick Brown .241 Norm Cash .279 Gary Geiger .249 Jim Gentile .251 Gene Green .280 Ken Hunt .185 Willie Kirkland .200 Jim Landis .228 Bubba Phillips .258 Al Smith .292 Willie Tasby .236

COMMENT Earl Averill: Had 44 career homers. Played only two major league seasons after 1961. Steve Bilko: Had HR every 14.7 at bats in 1961; HR every 27.1 at bats when he hit 21 in 1953. Johnny Blanchard: Had .613 slugging average in 1961. Maris had .620 slugging average that season. Dick Brown: Gave way as Tiger catcher after 1962 to Bill Freehan, a fixture the next 13 seasons. Norm Cash: Led majors in batting at .361 in 1961. Highest average the next 13 seasons: .283. Gary Geiger: Led Red Sox in home runs in 1961, which was Carl Yastrzemski’s rookie season. Jim Gentile: Hit five grand slams in 1961,including two in first two at-bats in a game vs. Twins. Gene Green: His 18 home runs were the most hit by a Senator catcher in franchise’s history. Ken Hunt: Played only three more seasons after 1961 because of injury. Willie Kirkland: Traded for Harvey Kuenn in 1961; couldn’t make Indian fans forget Rocky Colavito. Jim Landis: Had 93 homers in 11 major league seasons. Bubba Phillips: Had 62 homers in 10 major league seasons. Al Smith: Led AL third basemen with 28 homers in 1961. Had slugging average of .506. Willie Tasby: Was traded to Indians after 11 games in 1962. Out of major leagues after 1963.